Pareto Principle

The empirical observation, named after economist Vilfredo Pareto, that in many systems roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. In crowdsourcing and volunteer communities, the principle predicts that a small number of top contributors produce the majority of output, while a long tail of occasional participants contributes the remainder. The principle matters for accessibility projects because sustaining both groups is essential: top contributors deliver throughput, while the long-tail community provides the social signal that motivates everyone and the redundancy that protects against top-contributor burnout.